What's Making Us Happy Vol. 2

Tee hee.

Possibly the greatest of all the Ham Fam’s super powers is the ability to find happiness in the simplest things. With great power comes great responsibility and stuff, right? So with that we bring you the second installment of what’s currently making us happy. Enjoy!

Taylor

Um, Amazon Prime Day is next week! There will be deals all day long and mama needs a new TV. Also, Simmy is an outdoor kitty again!

The Spice Girls song “Wannabe” just got a feminist makeover by Project Everyone. I think it’s great because they’re using a Spice Girl’s song that’s really clever – like it’s a song about girls being friends, but now they’re empowering girls. It’s raising awareness of what girls actually really really want. They’re not saying they want boys and cute shoes, they’re saying pay us for the work that we’re doing, treat us equally. It makes me happy because it’s an infectious song to start, people remember it, and people hearing it for the first time will tie it to women’s issues that really matter.

The new Blood Orange album "Freetown Sound" is really good too. He (Dev Hynes) makes unique music. It’s not radio music. There’s no hooks, there’s no catches. It’s all original sounds. And because they’re not mainstream, they’re able to make the music they want to make. I also love that he shares his love for Missy Elliott and other female hip-hop and R&B artists.

The Juno space probe arrived at Jupiter this week and I’m super excited about it. Juno travelled 1.8 billion miles, without pee breaks, and took about five years to arrive. (Plus, it got its own Google Doodle, so you know it’s important.)

The Verge

The mission’s goal is to study the evolution of Jupiter along with finding out what its core is made of and how it produces such a large magnetic field. The probe will orbit Jupiter about 30 times until the end of its mission in 2018. By the end we may have even more answers to the origins of our solar system.

Also making me happy this week is a tweet from Stanley Kubrick’s daughter that basically bitch slaps all the conspiracy theorists who say her dad helped the U.S. government fake the 1969 moon landing:

I love a good conspiracy, but WE WENT TO THE MOON, Y’ALL. Get over it.

The Night Of on HBO is making me really happy this week. I instantly fell in love with it. Basically it follows a crime that you know took place and back tracks to fill in all the blanks, kind of like “The Killing.” All we know is that the main boy, Riz Ahmed – Ah! He’s so cute! – is hanging out with a girl, they go to sleep, he wakes up, she’s dead and he is blamed. It’s also like the podcast Serial in the sense that you feel for the guy. I think the pilot episode is the only that’s aired so far. There’s no other date online for the next episode, so now I’m even more anxious!